Date/Time: 7th October 2014

Booker Prize winning author Pat Barker is famed for her fictional treatments of the First World War, including:

• the Regeneration Trilogy (1991-1995), which addresses the psychological wounds of the conflict and their medical treatment by W. H. R. Rivers
• Life Class (2007) and Toby’s Room (2012), which look at the facial injuries of the First World War and the pioneering surgery of Harold Gillies

In this lecture she reflects on these novels in conversation with Anne Whitehead, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature.

 

This event coincided with the Hatton Gallery’s exhibition ‘Screaming Steel: Art, War and Trauma’.

 

About the speaker

Pat Barker is one of the most important contemporary British writers, and is particularly celebrated for her historical fictions of the First World War.

Born in Teesside, Barker went on to study international history at the London School of Economics. Her first novel was Union Street (1982), which remains one of the bestselling Virago titles, and which established her ongoing concern with the themes of class, gender, trauma, and recovery.

In 1995 Barker won the Booker Prize for The Ghost Road, the last volume of her celebrated Regeneration Trilogy, and in 2000 she was honoured with a CBE.